


altar boys.

by lovelyorbent



Series: pretty golden hair [2]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Becket Family Feels, Financial Issues, Other, Prostitution, Siblings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-20
Updated: 2015-11-08
Packaged: 2018-04-05 06:07:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4168845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovelyorbent/pseuds/lovelyorbent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>yancy gets bitten by a radioactive prostitute and turns into super escort, able to annoy the living shit out of herc hansen in a single bound all while being sort of weirdly attractive.</p><p>(escort!yancy, the prologue and epilogue in way more words than you asked for.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this has been mostly written and sitting around for ages. i wasn't going to publish it in chapters, or maybe even at all, but i figure this way i'll feel bad about it until i finish it, which is a great way to get me to finish things, incidentally. guilt.
> 
> anywho, this is basically escort!yancy's origin story and harry potter seventeen years later piece/the place where i tie up some loose ends. more tags will be added if i think they need to be added at some later date?
> 
> this chapter is mostly cute beckets and yancy stressing about money.
> 
> title from the same song as the last one.

Yancy is working two jobs at the time the massive book of colleges appears on the table of their shitty apartment, and his heart sort of—sinks a little, because it’s midnight and Jaz is in bed already and he knows she left this out here for him to see. And unless she manages to get a full ride and a fucking sugar daddy, he can’t pay for that.

Raleigh didn’t even _apply_ , four years ago when he ought to have.  Just sucked it up and got a crappy construction job, and Yancy had to bite back on his stupid rage and feelings that he’d failed the kid, but then again, they’d had a teenage girl to be taking care of, then.

So he was distracted.

And it’s a fucking shame, really, because Jazmine is so, so smart.  She’s wanted to be a _doctor_ since she was in middle school and he doesn’t want to have to be the one to say no, but… he can’t pay for medical school.

Not right now, at least.

He doesn’t tell her that yet. Just reads through her essays when he has a few hours on Sundays, gives her all the information to apply for financial aid and the money for fees and tests, which they can afford, at least. Figures they can cross that bridge when they come to it, and… he doesn’t know how he’s going to tell her no when she’s got the letters in her hands, but it’s something, at least, he’s extending a faint hope.

Raleigh sits across the table from the two of them while they’re doing applications, just watching, and Yancy remembers doing this for himself, seven years ago.

(Has it really been seven years?)

“Yance,” he says, quietly, some Tuesday in October, “Um, do you think that…”

Raleigh has this habit of not asking him for things and he hates it, so he just rolls his eyes and says, “C’mon, kiddo.  Do I think what?”

Raleigh clears his throat and pushes ahead. “I’m going to do some applications too. Is that okay?”

Yancy is the only one of the three of them who ever handles the bank, so he guesses maybe Raleigh doesn’t know how little they’ve got saved up, but fuck, it’s definitely not enough for two kids going to college.  “Yeah,” he says anyway, because he doesn’t know how to say no.  Figures it’s time to start thinking about whether loans and shit might help—there’s a lot about his life that’s shit, but his credit score is excellent.   “Go ahead. Just—”

“I know,” Raleigh cuts him off. “It’s a long shot.”

Yancy swallows his failure and ruffles his brother’s hair, then puts his plate in the sink. “Okay.”

Raleigh could probably live on his own, but instead he’s here helping out.  Asking permission.  Yancy wonders when he became ‘dad’ for these kids, and figures it’s about when their real one had fucked off.  “Good night, Yancy,” Raleigh says as he walks down the hall.

“Night, Rals.”

What do they expect him to do, start stripping?

It wouldn’t be a half bad idea if he could dance to save his life.

At this point—well, if he could sell his ass on the streets in conservative, backwoods Alaska and send his brother and sister to college, he’d do it in a fucking heartbeat.

He picks up a third job because he knows exactly how well that wouldn’t go over.

 

Jazmine gets full ride to the University of Washington at Seattle, and because neither Raleigh or Yancy can afford to take a few days off work and go for a visit, Yancy just says, “Go ahead and tell them you can come.”

His mouth is probably writing checks his ass can’t cash, but her face lights up and she throws herself into his arms, so he just—pretends he’s not worried about it, doesn’t catch Raleigh’s eye over her shoulder even though he knows damned well his brother’s trying for it.  “Thank you,” she says, and he hates, hates being thanked for this, because it’s not enough, he isn’t the arbiter of what she gets to do, he’s _not_ her dad, he doesn’t get to give her permission.

But he isn’t a total dick, so he just bends down, grabs her around the waist, and throws her over his shoulder, one hand locked around her legs, and spins her around in the kitchen until she’s shrieking at him to stop and then tosses her forwards again, catching her with an arm around her back and her hands scrambling for his shoulders. “Catch,” he says to Raleigh, and his brother’s arms go out as his loosen around her back like he’s about to throw her to him.

She tightens her hands like a vise around his neck, screams, “No!  No, Yancy, don’t you dare!” and both he and Raleigh break down laughing. “You _assholes_ ,” she says, smacking his head as he puts her down on the counter, and he kisses her cheek and lets her kick him in the stomach.

“Now we just need to find you six roommates, the cheapest apartment in the world, and find the cure for having to eat,” Raleigh murmurs, but he’s not very quiet about it. Yancy turns around to give him the _shut up_ look, even though he was thinking the same damn thing, but Jazmine is undeterred.

“Don’t be a buzzkill, Raleigh.”

“Sorry,” Raleigh says, holding up his hands.  “Sorry.”

Yancy flicks his nose on the way out the door, crooking a finger at his little sister. “Come on, college girl. Let Eeyore here mope on his lonesome and go do your homework.  I’ll do dinner tonight when I get home from work, all right?”

When he and Raleigh are alone in the kitchen, he crosses his arms over his chest and gives Raleigh that look again.  “I’m sorry,” his brother says again.  “I just—”

“I know, kiddo,” Yancy tells him, because he does.  He’s jealous, too. “Just give me a couple of days before I have to hit her over the head with real life, okay?”

A couple of days later, though, Raleigh gets waitlisted from two of his schools and rejected from the third, and Yancy—Yancy doesn’t feel as relieved as he probably should, just tired.  He doesn’t know where the desire to go to school came from, because as far as he knows, Raleigh’s never been the academic of his two younger siblings, but it’s there, and the fact that it’s basically crushed makes Yancy just want to curl up with the two of them and make it better somehow.

He settles for pulling Raleigh, who is twenty-two and totally does not need him anymore, into his lap and tickling him like he’s still seven.  Jazmine joins in and all three of them end up panting on the floor.

It’s really fucking late and he needs sleep and Jaz should go to bed, but he rolls over and gathers his little brother up in his arms instead and waits for Jazmine to lay on top of them.  “Waitlists aren’t rejections,” she says when she crawls over his side to lie on Raleigh’s chest.

“Yeah, but they’re also not scholarship offers,” Raleigh replies, and it’s with a smile, but Yancy knows he doesn’t really feel that grin he’s holding up.

“How about you go for a run and take a shower, kiddo?” Yancy suggests.

By the time Raleigh gets back, Yancy and Jaz are curled up on the couch waiting for him with half a bottle of cheap wine and a bag of chips even though it’s a Tuesday night and all three of them need to be up early tomorrow.

Yancy falls asleep halfway through _The Lion King_ , but that’s fine.

When he wakes up for work, Raleigh’s already in the kitchen with the coffee, and Jazmine is running around like a madwoman doing homework she _should_ have done last night. He doesn’t have the presence of mind to scold her, because he’s still asleep in his heart, but Raleigh does it for him, rolls up the newspaper and whacks her lightly in the back of the head with it.

They’re a pretty good team that way.

 

Here’s how Yancy’s life works: get up too early, drop Raleigh off at work on the way to taking Jazmine to school, answer the phone and type up courtroom notes for eight hours at the law office, pick Jazmine up from school and drive her home, go to whichever part-time job he’s on shift for tonight for six hours, hope Raleigh found a ride home and didn’t have to walk.

After that, sometimes he makes dinner, if he’s told them he will, or one of them has done it.

Then sometimes they play a card game or Jaz does homework while he reads and Raleigh does whatever Raleigh happens to want to do that day, or, when it’s been a long day for one or two or all three of them, however many people need to just crash just do. Bedtime is midnight—he doesn’t actually enforce it and Raleigh doesn’t observe it, but that’s the time when Jaz stops waiting up for them if they’re not home yet, and it’s the time Yancy calls it quits if he’s been staying up for some reason.

Then they do it again the next day.

Tonight Jazmine is doing Calculus—multivar, Yancy is proud and alarmed at the same time—sprawled across Raleigh’s lap on the floor, and Raleigh is watching the news over her shoulder with a beer bottle dangling from his fingers.  Yancy himself is a little buzzed, because you sort of need to be after six hours of dealing with the kind of shithead that gets coffee at night, halfway to asleep on the couch behind the two of them.

“Hey,” Raleigh says quietly, and somehow it’s audible over his distraction and the voice of the news anchor, who is yelling something about the economy like they don’t know it's shitty.  Like they are not currently dealing with how shitty it is personally.

“Yeah?” Yancy asks, turning his head to look at the back of his little brother’s.

“Got taken off the waitlist at Santa Barbara.  Accepted.”

“ _What_?” Jazmine exclaims, sitting up in a flurry of papers. “Raleigh!  Holy shit!”

Raleigh starts laughing, and Yancy’s really, really glad neither of them is looking at him just yet, but it’s only a matter of seconds, probably, so he shoves all of the horror off his face and plasters a smile on.

Sure enough, Raleigh turns around as soon as it becomes apparent that Jazmine can’t find any more words that aren't incoherent happy noises at the moment.  The smile on his face is hesitant, but it’s still enough to kickstart Yancy’s own, and, even though he feels uncomfortably sober right now, he rolls off the couch and drapes himself over his little brother’s back.  “Congratulations, kid.”

“No scholarships, though.”

Close to forty thousand dollars a year, out of state, plus whatever the cost of living otherwise ends up being, fees and books and food and housing and shit.

That’s more than Yancy’s entire yearly salary, with three jobs combined.

Calculated out with whatever Jazmine needs—fifteen thousand a year, minimum, if she doesn’t get hurt or do anything that isn’t eating and sleeping under a roof—calculated out with whatever _he_ needs, totals up to _way too fucking much_.

“That’s okay,” Yancy hears himself say, even though it isn’t.  He’s not a convincing enough actor, though, because that barely-there smile Raleigh’s holding up hopefully to him slides right off his face.

“Yeah,” he sighs, and Yancy sincerely hates that Raleigh is perceptive enough to know he's a little sick to his stomach with this. “I know.”

“You’re both depressing,” Jazmine tells them, and gets up off Raleigh’s lap to turn off the TV. “C’mere, Gaucho.” Yancy smiles a little harder to try and make it okay, and even though it feels kind of fake on his face, Raleigh grins too, like he can’t help it at the nickname.  He scrambles out of Yancy’s arms to his feet, and Jazmine grabs his hands and spins him around, shoves him into the kitchen counter so that she can reach the shitty little radio over his shoulder and turn it on. “Dance with me.”

Yancy watches her pull Raleigh into a loose approximation of dancing to a grainy rendition of some ancient song that’s coming over the radio, and doesn’t object, because his brother’s smile is turning more real by the second.

He doesn’t think Jazmine _gets_ it.

She’s seventeen—almost eighteen, but _seventeen_.  He didn’t understand either, then.  She was twelve during the really rough period, so her memories of it are probably kind of fuzzy, but Raleigh remembers, that year after Richard left, where Yancy was working his ass off and barely making ends meet and barely there because he was always at his jobs.  Since then, he’s been better about not making them feel the loss of easiness, and since Raleigh got a job, too, it’s been okay, but a hundred thousand in expenses every year isn’t a laughing matter.  Especially if she doesn’t plan on working, or Raleigh doesn’t—even with the bank kicking in money, it would only be twenty-five thousand per institution, probably, and even that would mean they’d own him for the rest of his shitty life.

She’s smart, but she doesn’t understand how hard it is.  Because he’s gone out of his way to pretend there is no strain.

Of _course_ that would come back to bite him in the ass.

Jazmine got her night without him worrying her about it, though.

Raleigh should get his.

He gets up, unsteady—maybe he’s had a little more beer than he thought—and wraps his arms around Raleigh from behind, getting his hands on Jazmine’s waist so he can bookend his brother with his sister’s help.  Tucks his chin over Raleigh’s shoulder and grins at him, because fuck it.

One night, before he has to figure out whether to say no or sign over the rest of his everything.

What could it hurt?

“I’m so proud of you guys,” he tells them, trying not to choke up, because it’s true. “My college kids, huh?”

Raleigh throws his head back against Yancy’s shoulder and laughs.  Jazmine wrinkles her nose.  “Don’t be gross, Yance.”

The tinny-voiced radio host announces _Dancing Queen_.

Their sister's eyes go wide, and Yancy feels rather than sees Raleigh sprout a grin that looks just like his own.

“Hey,” he says. “It’s Jazmine’s song.”

She starts pulling at their arms, trying to get loose, so she can get to the counter and turn it off, but they don’t let her.  “No! No, we’re not—”

“Nuh-uh,” Yancy says, and Raleigh starts laughing again.  “You’re trapped, sweetheart.”

Her struggles become more pronounced. Yancy’s pretty sure Raleigh’s got a faceful of curly hair. “Fuck you both!”

“Gross,” Raleigh says, and Yancy squeezes his arms around their waists.

“Wait, wait, wait, wait for it, Rals—”

Jazmine tries to drown them out when they start singing along by swearing at them at the top of her lungs, but it’s only successful enough to get the next-door neighbours banging on the wall of the apartment.

“I hate you both,” she says, when their laughter has made their arms weak enough to let her slip free to turn the song off.

Neither of them has enough breath to reply.

 

When Yancy gets home at three in the morning the next day, Raleigh’s sitting up at the dining room table reading one of Mom's old books.

Instead of saying hi, he hands his older brother a cupcake.  One of the ones Jazmine makes whenever it’s someone’s birthday or Christmas or when she has some babysitting money to spend on the ingredients.

Yancy stares at it for a moment, trying to figure out what the shape on the top is. “Hey.”

“It’s a graduation cap,” Raleigh says.  “Pretend you knew all along when she asks if you liked it tomorrow morning.”

“Fuck, did I miss it?”

Raleigh laughs quietly and entirely without mirth.  “No, it’s like, a month from now.”

“Oh, thank god. I gotta request leave, do you remember the date?”

He sits down across from Raleigh to eat the cupcake, finding himself suddenly utterly devoid of appetite for any kind of real food.  He’s been trying to figure out how to say _no_ all day, that he can’t spend the rest of his life working three jobs, but Raleigh doesn’t let him start.

“She put it on the calendar on your bedside table.  I can’t go, can I?  We can’t afford it.”

The frosting on Yancy’s tongue tastes like sawdust.  The words are hard to force out, even though he’s been rehearsing them all day. “No.  We can’t.”

“Even if you moved with me and we lived together?”

Yancy tries to laugh, but he thinks it comes out bitter.  “I wasn’t thinking about staying here if you guys were gone.  And cost of living’s higher in Santa Barbara than Seattle, so I figured I’d be with you; split the load easier.”

“What if I got a job?”

“Depends on what the job was. Right now, I’d have to pony up a hundred grand a year to keep us all alive and you both in school, minimum.”

Raleigh sucks in a breath through his teeth.  “We could take out a loan,” he says, weakly.

“Seventy-five grand a year, then, if the bank really loved me.”

Yancy hates that crushed look Raleigh’s getting on his face.

“Okay,” his little brother murmurs, and then looks away from him, back into his book, like he’s hiding his face.  “Sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry,” Yancy tells him automatically.  Reassuring Raleigh is like breathing, these days.  “It’s fine.  You know I’d give it to you if I could.  Maybe some kind of community college?”

“It’s fine,” Raleigh repeats after him.  “I get it, Yancy. It was dumb anyway.”

Yancy reaches over the table to ruffle his hair even as he’s getting up to reheat some real food. “It’s not dumb. It’s not fair that you don’t get to.”

“Just, you know, I didn’t want to work construction for the rest of my life.”

Part of Yancy wants to be angry, because fuck, _he_ doesn’t even have a high school diploma, let alone a college degree. It’s not like he doesn’t _get_ how shitty it is to get up every day and work a minimum wage job with no hope of getting a better one.  Does Raleigh ever think about what he’s asking him to give up, signing him up to do this for the rest of his life?

But he’s not. He’s not angry.

Because Raleigh _does_ think about it.  Understands in a way Jazmine can’t, because Jazmine’s never had a paid job that isn’t tutoring or babysitting.   Raleigh’s been so, _so_ good all these years, never complained when he had to give something he wanted up, got a job to help out—makes dinner every day Yancy can’t and Jaz is busy with homework or friends or having a life like a teenager should.

Raleigh’s looking into getting a second job too, even though his current one is more strenuous than all of Yancy’s put together.

To help Jazmine get her degree.

Yancy’s not selfish enough to be mad at him for hoping for something better.

“Hey,” he tells his brother softly, and kneels down next to his chair.

He’s exhausted.

Raleigh puts down his book and looks at him.

Yancy holds out his arms, and waits for Raleigh to pull himself into a hug before he pats him on the back. “I love you, okay? If you want this, I’ll make it work. Loans, jobs, whatever. You and me, we’ll live in a box or something.  It’s not like it’s gonna get real cold down there.”

Raleigh laughs into his neck, watery.  “We could eat roadkill.”

Yancy gets one hand stroking through his hair, because that’s been good for calming Raleigh down since he was a baby.  “Jump in the ocean instead of showering.  You’ll be real popular at school.”

“Yeah,” Raleigh says, and now his back is shaking with laughter.  “Sew our own clothes out the skins of whatever wildlife Santa Barbara has.  We could make it work, right?”

Yancy feels his smile fade. “I’m serious.  Not about the box, about making it work.  I can do it.”

If he has to commit credit card fraud and rob a fucking bank, he’ll do it.

Raleigh pulls back. “I’m not gonna ask you to do that, Yance.”

“You didn’t, I volunteered it.”  He doesn’t quite know how his answer changed from _no_ to _I’ll move heaven and earth to make it happen_.  But this feels truer.

Raleigh pushes him away, towards the counter, hiding his face.  “Think about it for a couple of days before you really volunteer it. I know you surprised yourself a little by saying yeah to Jaz, and she wasn’t asking for a hundred grand.”

“That obvious, huh?”

“You acted like you’d just stepped on a rake and hit yourself in the face with it, Yancy.”

“Okay,” Yancy says, and drops a kiss into his hair before he goes back to the microwave. “I’ll think about it and get back to you in a couple of days.”

“But, um, while you’re thinking about it,” Raleigh says, “Remember I’m volunteering to work too, it’s not just your hundred thousand.  And I talked to Jaz and she said she would, too, after the first semester. If that changes anything.”

When Yancy goes to bed, he dreams about working back to back shifts.

He tells Raleigh to tell them yes three days later.

 _Fuck it_ , he thinks, staring at the ceiling of his bedroom. He’ll figure something out.

He always does.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> i refuse to let this turn into another super long piece of crap, but it looks like that's where it's headed, so enjoy my inability to write short, i guess.
> 
> don't worry, i'll skip like... four years in a little bit. as soon as yancy's done being :c about his kids.
> 
> also... raleigh taking his shirt off unnecessarily is now a major theme of everything i'm going to write

Yancy doesn’t get to say goodbye to Jazmine.

Not for real, anyway; he doesn’t get to drop her off.  He and Raleigh can’t afford to both leave, not when all the finalities of packing need to be done, and besides, that would leave him jobless for two weeks until he can pick up on the hotel clerk job he managed to swing in Santa Barbara. He and Raleigh are gonna need a couple of days to tie up all the loose ends and move, but they can’t afford much more than that, with all the money the beginning of the school year and apartment deposit and rent for him and his brother is gonna suck down.

The last time they moved he’d just sold the house.  This time they’re just dropping the lease.  No cushion but the savings that are now nonexistent, after having paid the first installments of tuition.

If Yancy were the kind of person who freaked out, he’d be freaking out.

Instead he’d given Raleigh the money for the ferry and the car and sent him to Seattle to drop off their baby sister.

He’s going to miss her birthday, too.

Early September.

 _Fuck_ Richard.

It’s not really Richard’s fault he’s in this situation, it’s his own fault, for saying yes to the both of them. It’s the universe’s fault generally that Jazmine was born too smart to be wasted in some shitty dead-end job and Raleigh can’t get anything better than construction without a higher degree.

But it makes him feel a little better about being the secretary to some elderly lawyer who reminds him of his dead grandmother to blame it on his dad.

Raleigh sends him a picture of Jazmine and her roommate, both of them grinning wide, arms around each other.

Just like Jaz to make best friends with a complete stranger in a day.

 _Kiss her goodbye twice_ , he tells his brother.   _And tell her she better call us_.

When Raleigh makes it back two days later, Yancy’s sitting in the middle of the living room, surrounded by all Dominique’s books, staring absently at the one he’s holding in his left hand.  “Dude, it’s six in the morning,” Raleigh says.  “What are you doing up without your face shoved into a coffee cup?”

“Alarm went off and I already packed the mug,” Yancy replies, voice distant.  “We’re going to have to sell these books. We can’t make more than one trip.”

“I’ll hold a couple on the way down.”

“We’ll see. Might be better to have the extra money. I think some of them are ranging on antique, anyhow.”

Raleigh plunks to the floor next to him.  “Did you sleep last night?”

“Look me dead in the eye and tell me you think I’d skip a night of sleep.”

Raleigh laughs, and leans into his shoulder.  “She loves it there, you know.  You should have seen her face.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t. You’ll have to draw me a picture.” It comes out a little too bitter. Yancy sighs.  “Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Raleigh tells him mildly.  “I know you wanted to come.”

“We’re gonna miss her birthday,” Yancy says dully.

Raleigh wraps his arms around his waist and takes the book out of his hand.  It’s a little bit of a role reversal, but Yancy figures Raleigh can deal with that for a little while.  He’s a big boy.  “Yeah,” he says. “Eighteen.  I know.”

“Remember your eighteenth birthday?” Yancy asks him, and his little brother whacks him gently with the book he’s just taken out of his hands.

“Feeling a little empty-nested, Yance?”

“I don’t know how actual parents handle it.”

Raleigh laughs and stands up, pulling him up with him.  “You need to get going soon, Yance.  I’ll take care of figuring out how to pack the car.”

Raleigh’s not going to leave him high and dry when all this is over.

It helps, a little, as he’s writing down some divorcing couple’s contact details on a post-it note, to think of this as an investment in the future instead of a complete removal of everything resembling financial security for the rest of his natural life.

 

It’s really, really fucking warm in Santa Barbara in August.

Yancy is pretty sure he can feel new freckles happening on his face as he steps out of the car, walking around the other side to get the stuff off Raleigh’s lap so he can get out, too. “Fuck, is this the tropics?” Raleigh says, as soon as he gets out of the car, and pulls off his shirt.

Yancy rolls his eyes. “Carry some boxes in before you lose any more clothes, Magic Mike.”

“What’s the number again?”

“1003. Your key’s in the envelope in the cupholder.”

“Under the cup?”

Yancy pulls their overnight bags out and slings them over his shoulders, blowing out a breath of air to get the one lock of hair that always tries to escape his part back into place, or at least out of his eyes.  Jesus, he needs a haircut.  “No, in the other cupholder.”

“It’s not there.”

“I was being sarcastic. It’s under the cup.”

Raleigh pokes his head out the door to give him a look as he’s about to disappear up the narrow steps into the apartment building.  “You suck at sarcasm.”

“You mean I’ve transcended your level.”

He doesn’t give Raleigh a chance to reply, just climbs the stairs.

The apartment is smaller than the last one, which is good, because there’s only two of them. It’s got that particular smell he knows to associate with cockroaches, but the floor is bare—he doesn’t see any. Can’t hear them scuttling around, either. The couch is threadbare and it doesn’t match the walls, but Yancy really couldn’t care less.

He tosses his bag on the bed in the back bedroom—and fuck, the sheets are packed under the clothes—and Raleigh’s on the bed in the other, and looks around, a little.

It’s cramped. It looks a little dingy.

But it’s clean, and there’s a roof on it.

It’ll do.

He wonders what Jazmine’s dorm room looks like.  He kind of misses her already.  The three of them haven’t been really, actually apart for… well, maybe ever.  And Yancy’s spent the last seven years taking care of his baby sister. It’s weird that she isn’t bouncing on this bed right now or pretending to have pulled a muscle so Raleigh will do all her heavy lifting for her.

She called last night, but he wants to talk to her anyway.

Pulling out his phone, he taps her contact photo.

 _Calling Dancing Queen_ , the screen informs him, but it goes to voicemail.

He hopes she’s having fun.

By the time he and Raleigh have cleared out the car and finally locked the door behind them, neither of them are in the mood to do anything more than sit down on the couch and stare at the wall.  Unfortunately, duty calls. Yancy yawns.  “I gotta go grocery shopping.”

“Nnno,” Raleigh moans, and flops over his lap dramatically.  “Stay.”

Yancy guesses it can wait.

 

Jazmine’s first day of class is one week before Raleigh’s.  She calls them buzzing afterwards, and Yancy spends most of the call watching her face on the elderly laptop screen instead of listening to her. Raleigh lapses into French the way he sometimes does when he’s excited and wants to get words out fast, and that really just makes it easier to tune them out and just look at the two of them.

They’re not _his_ kids.  He doesn’t feel paternal.

But they’re his. They’re worth it.

“Yancy misses you,” Raleigh tells their sister, and he starts.

Jazmine laughs. It sounds just like Mom’s used to. “Yeah, Yance.  Wake up, lazy.  You miss me?”

Yancy, in lieu of figuring out how to actually react, grins and puts Raleigh in a headlock, shoving him out of frame.  “’course I do. But that’s an industrial secret.”

Raleigh, disheveled, manages to wrestle his way free and pop back up next to him. Yancy ducks the hit to the back of his head before his little brother even starts moving, and Raleigh, pouting, steals the computer away and turns it away from him.  “It’s totally not.  He’s mopey, Jaz.”

“Traitor,” Yancy informs him.

He’s not really sure why, but everything lately feels like he’s putting on an act. Like he reacts the way Yancy would react, without being Yancy.  It’s a completely ridiculous idea, but he can’t shake it.  At work he zombies through for the first three weeks, before he realizes he’s never going to get anywhere if he doesn’t put on a face and show them he’s good.

Life falls back into a rhythm. That makes it a hell of a lot easier.

Get up too early, go to the hotel for eight hours.  Go home and listen to Raleigh or Jazmine or both talk about school, make dinner, help Raleigh with homework if he needs it, which usually he doesn’t, but sometimes he asks anyway. Try to find another job. Beat the streets, online applications, adjusting résumés and writing cover letters.  Go to sleep.

On Jazmine’s eighteenth birthday, they call her early in the morning, and Yancy falls asleep on the table.

They’ve been in Santa Barbara for a month.

Yancy has yet to see the water except out the window of the hotel.

“Hey,” Raleigh says, that evening when he gets home from his job.  Yancy’s not totally clear on what it is he’s doing, but it involves an apron with the name of some hippie café on it.  “You okay?”

“Yeah,” Yancy replies, because… yeah, he’s getting there.  He’s getting used to not having Jazmine around.  And he’s managed to mostly distract himself from the eternal purgatory of college finances.  It’s going to work, that’s all he knows.  He still doesn’t smile right some days, and he’s pretty sure Raleigh knows that, but it’s getting easier.  “Just didn’t expect to be missing a birthday, you know?”

“Think of it this way,” Raleigh says, leaning against his shoulder.  “You don’t have to buy a present.”

Yancy snorts and wraps an arm around his shoulders.  “Wow.”

“You wanna watch hockey until she calls?”

“Nah,” Yancy says, and then realizes what that sounded like.  “I mean, yeah, but I’m going to be working on applications. And she’s not gonna call. I mailed her roommate forty bucks and told her to take her out to dinner.  They’re probably gonna be out late.”

Bad business decision, but, well.  He thinks he’s gonna sell the car, so he can justify the loss.

Raleigh blinks. “Oh.  Then I’m going to invite someone to come watch with us. That okay?”

Yancy raises an eyebrow, turning his head away from the laptop to look at him.  “Sure.  Just don’t expect me to be Mr. Congeniality.”

His little brother grins, but he’s already pulling out his phone.  “I’d never expect that of you, Yancy.”

“Jackass,” Yancy mouths at him as a soft noise over the phone indicates that someone has picked up. He’s halfway through begging for a job at the local Starbucks—because do what you know, he guesses, at least his expectations for job satisfaction are already low—when somebody knocks on the door.

Raleigh’s friend is close to a foot shorter than him.

She’s pretty, too.

 _God_ , he needs to get laid.

“Hey,” he says, waving from the couch.

“This is my brother,” Raleigh says to her, gesturing vaguely in his direction.  “And Yancy, this is Mako.”

Yancy sits up and grins. “Oh, hey.  Raleigh never shuts up about you.”

Mako makes a considering noise, but doesn’t smile.  It’s a little disconcerting, at first, but some people just are that way. Behind her back, Raleigh is making motions with his finger across his throat.

Which of course means Yancy has to keep going.  Raleigh’s so cute to think he’d let a little thing like his baby brother’s dignity stop him. “Seriously, it’s like you’re all he can talk about.  It’s good to finally meet you.”

She steps forwards and holds out a hand.  “We hear a lot about you as well.”

“All good, I hope,” he says, and turns on the charming smile.

Mako almost, almost smiles back, he thinks, which is most people’s reactions to his charming smile, but Raleigh sits down on the couch next to him and gestures her towards his other side.  “That’s enough cliché from you, Yance.”

Yancy traces the letters C-U-T-E on his brother’s side with a finger, and Raleigh resolutely ignores him.

Like a mature adult.

But Yancy can see he’s smiling a little.

 

Every morning, after the checkout rush, Yancy reads the News-Press from the stand next to the desk until someone needs him.  The jobs section is interesting—no one really uses it anymore, so it’s full of jobs that are sort of obscure, like “personal handyman”, which sounds like the start of some bad porn, and “nanny”, and “prison guard”, because apparently the prison system will hire any schmuck who can breathe without tripping over his feet.

He thinks about both of the last two of those, but the nanny job specifies that they’re looking for a woman, and they both conflict with his hours here.

He’s putting in shifts at Starbucks four evenings a week now.

But three’s the charm, for jobs, right now, so he’s still looking.  And anyway, there’s no harm in always looking for something better than what he’s got.  Take advantage of his opportunities.

Today there’s a listing for an escort service.

Yancy wants to pretend he wants to laugh and not read further than the title, because he knows exactly what “paid companionship” actually means, but in reality… well. There’s a number under the phrase _call for interview_ at the bottom of the listing, which he reads the entirety of, like he reads every listing.

That’s a little unusual, no application, but he guesses what they do is a little unusual, and how someone looks is probably a big percentage of the reason they get hired.

He calls.

Because hell, if nothing else, he can laugh about it with Raleigh later, right?

Except when he gets home and starts trying to figure out what to wear to an interview with a company that hires out prostitutes, he finds he really has no desire to mention it to Raleigh at all.

Raleigh would feel bad. Raleigh might even drop out of school, even if Yancy tried to convince him it was a joke.

So he just says, “I have an interview tomorrow after work, help me pick out a tie.”

“You only have two ties,” his little brother says, rolling his eyes.

He’s doing bio homework, Yancy thinks, or at least that’s what that sketch at the top of his paper looks like.  “And I need to know which one goes better with black.”

“Dude, everything goes with black.”

“That attitude you’re copping doesn’t go with anything.”

Raleigh looks over at him. “Blue.  Red is Jazmine’s colour.  Where’re you interviewing?”

“Phone bank,” Yancy lies.

“Sounds better than Starbucks.”

“Pays better, too,” he says mildly.  Which is not a lie, because he looked up the going rates in this area, and _shit_.

(Working three hundred and thirty-three days a year for the basic going rate, three hundred dollars, half off because the company gets half, two hours a session average, is a hundred grand. In less than a year. Not that he expects he’d be working three hundred and thirty-three days a year, but he has another job, doesn’t he?)

Raleigh makes a pretending-to-be-interested noise, because, Yancy supposes, one twenty-one-year-old can only be so much of an angel. “That’s cool, Yance. Does the ‘i’ come before or after the ‘e’ in meiosis?”

“Before?” Yancy guesses, and then thinks about it.  “After,” he decides.  “Shit, I haven’t taken a biology class for eleven years, how would I know?”

Raleigh picks up his phone. “I’m calling Mako.”

“Wow.”

His little brother gives him the finger as he raises the phone to his ear.  Yancy suspects it’s a big, fat excuse to call her, because he’s got a bio textbook right there in front of him and the internet at his fingertips.

It’s a really dumb excuse. He’s going to have to have a conversation with Raleigh about how to have a crush without making a complete idiot out of himself.

He ruffles Raleigh’s hair on the way out of the room, tie looped over his arm.

“Mako?” he hears, as he’s flopping down on the bed.

 

He thinks about it, while he’s getting dressed.  He makes a list in his head of why going to this interview at all is a terrible fucking idea. Because, well. He didn’t really think very critically about it before he set up the interview.  He just saw the ad, did about two minutes of research, and then divided 100,000 by 300.  Told himself there was no harm in applying.

Now the nerves are getting him, and holy shit, he’s going to an interview to see if he’s good enough to be paid for sex.  Does a job like this require experience?  His résumé includes ten years of working at fucking _Starbucks_. He’s going to be laughed out of the place.

And if he isn’t, then he knows he’s going to take the job, which will mean he’ll be fucking strangers for money. Sure, he’s no blushing virgin, but he also hasn’t had time to go out and get any for two years, and that was a one-night stand with the other night shift barista, and, oh, right, _he wasn’t getting paid for it_.

Actually, though, that part of this bothers him the least.

Everybody’s got a price if you go high enough, probably.  His is just… low.  Relatively, anyway. He’s not ashamed of the fact that he’s thinking about it, per se, because he does what he has to do, that’s how it’s always been for them.

Mostly the part that makes his conscience twinge is that Raleigh and Jaz aren’t going to like it. If he even gets it. If he even _tells_ them if he gets it.  He groans and ties his tie, draws it a little too tight because it’s always amused him to think of it as a noose.

“Raleigh!” he calls into the rest of the house before he leaves, and no one answers.

He leaves a note tacked to the wall right next to the door.

 _Interviewing. Be back at eight. Left dinner in the fridge_.

He locks the door to 1003 behind him and tries to cool the guilt that’s making him a little nauseous.

Before he gets on the bus, he sends Jazmine a text.

_Call tonight at 9ish?_

Her reply is almost instantaneous.

_raleigh says you have an interview, so yes, i need to know how it goes_

_Miss you, Princess._

_i just threw up in my mouth a little, yancy_

He grins at his phone.

Keeps grinning, as he walks into the building.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> BET YOU FORGOT I WAS EVEN STILL UPDATING THIS. i wrote about half of this like 69782435 years ago and the rest of it in the last hour, so... honestly it might not even be coherent. i'm just trying to get thru this to the relevant shit. this chapter is eminently skippable. next one might not be but i'm not really sure since i plotted exactly not at all for this story

“How’d it go?” Raleigh asks the second Yancy walks through the door, without ever looking up from his books.

“Weird,” Yancy replies, which is the truth, but perhaps not the sort of truth he thinks he can explain. It was weird because it was mostly normal, except that after he got out of the interview and into the quiet office again he’d been yanked into a back room by a woman named Stephanie and immediately trained to schedule sex work over the phone.  That, and the guy who’d walked him to the door after the job interview that had sounded almost exactly like the interview for his hotel job had told him to get a better suit, because most of the people who could “afford him” would be “able to tell.”

“Weird how?” Raleigh calls after him as he walks down the hallway and yanks the tie out from around his neck.  “Weird like you think you didn’t get it?”

“I’m pretty sure no one else applied,” Yancy says, shucking his suit jacket.  The shoes he kicks off immediately afterwards are barely presentable after eight years if wear and are probably going to fall apart soon, but he can’t think, right now, about buying new ones.

The truth is, Stephanie’d _told_ him he was the only applicant, right after she’d told him he was four hours out of Tijuana and needed to learn Spanish, and for fuck’s sake, why had he ever bothered with Portuguese?

“For a _phone bank?_ ” Raleigh asks, appearing in his bedroom doorway, if only to better express his incredulity. “Seriously?”

“Guess everybody else knows something I don’t.”

The thing is, Raleigh’s not stupid.  Raleigh’s a very smart kid. In fact, he’s an especially smart kid about whatever’s going on with Yancy at any given time. Which means that if Yancy’s going to be lying to him, which at this point seems like the only option he can think through, he needs to be damn careful about what he says.  Being a smartass helps, if only because every time Raleigh rolls his eyes his brain does a hard reset.

“Huh.”

“Hey, it’s pretty good money. How’s your night been?”

“Well, this is the first time I’ve gotten up since you left.”

“That’s my boy,” Yancy says, and yanks him into a headlock so he can knuckle the top of his head.

Raleigh’s not stupid, he thinks to himself again as he’s drifting off to sleep.  He’s going to have to be damn good to slip this by him.

For the first time in his life, he wishes they didn’t live together.

 

He manages to avoid thinking too deeply about any of the details of the thing too deeply until Jazmine asks him how the interview went.

Then his brain starts filing through the technicalities.

Should he tell them?

No, he decides almost instantly, finally shutting down the question he’s been thinking about for weeks. It would just freak them out. And anyway, it seems more real that way.

How’s he going to hide what he’s doing?

Well, Raleigh’s already used to him working weird hours, sometimes, and he can keep the hotel job. How he’s going to explain the money coming in… well.  It’s a real shame money laundering doesn’t work for family relations as well as it ostensibly works when fooling the government into thinking you’re not a drug dealer.

Then again, it’s always an option.  Dead relative with an inheritance to leave is a possibility, only a cheesey long-lost relative wouldn’t fool either of them, because they’ve got more than two brain cells apiece to rub together.

(It makes him uneasy to think so in-depth about lying to the two people in the world he would take a bullet for.)

But then again, well.

They’ve already got a dead mother.  Jazmine just turned eighteen.  Makes sense, a little, that if Dominique had left them anything, it’d be for now.

That, or maybe Richard’s mom could be “dead”.  It’s not like they ever talk to her anyway.  No, too much risk of the old bat popping up inconveniently in a couple of years wondering how her grandkids are doing for the first time since Yancy was eighteen.

“Yaaaancy,” Jazmine croons, and he zones back in.  “Went that badly, huh?”

“No, um. I think I got the job. Just thinking about other things.”

“Like what?” Raleigh asks him.

Yancy pauses, and looks between the two of them.  “Maybe some good news. Let me make sure before I tell you guys, okay?”

Jazmine’s eyebrows shoot up. “You mean better news than you getting the job?”

Raleigh? Raleigh’s just watching him, expressionlessly.

He’s going to have to think of a _damn_ good story.

“Yeah,” he says slowly. “Just want to know it’s a sure thing.”

Tonight he dreams about a faceless woman moaning his name and wakes up feeling vaguely disgusted with himself.

 

He’s distracted at the hotel until his ‘orientation’ day with the escort agency.  It’s impossible not to be, trying to predict how he’s going to react to literally renting himself out, trying to figure out how this works. But all the thinking he’s been doing about it at least makes it easier to keep up with all the information bouncing around.

He gives them his height, his weight, a picture of him from the waist up that they doctor the hell out of right there in front of them.  A list of things he can do—languages and random talents and areas of knowledge, which are depressingly few, given how wrapped up he’s been in working the last few years—and a list of things he’s completely unwilling to do.

The second list is very short, particularly because no one ever mentions sex.  It’s a legal thing, he guesses.  Legally, paid companionship is just companionship.

The way Yancy specifically phrases it when asked what his limits are, “If it’d help me pay these bills, I’d run naked through the middle of St. Peter’s square during mass.”

The guy taking his notes, who is very tall and so blonde his hair is almost white, looks at him deadpan and asks, “But how much would you do the Pope for?”

Yancy feels a little weird about the fact that he comes up with a numerical answer in less than a minute of consideration.

Vic, who is the blonde man, walks him partway home and imparts the illegal knowledge. “It doesn’t matter if you’re straight, if you can manage to put something in your ass, you do men too. There aren’t enough girls who hire us for you to be straight.”

The advice is endless.

How not to fuck a cop, even though apparently they’re more down on streetwalking than escort services. How to all-around maintain the thin veneer of legality the service provides him.  Vic’s personal success with wearing butt plugs to jobs to prevent johns from just fucking him dry, which makes Yancy want to hide somewhere for a very long time.  How technically, the agency collects fifty percent of his profit, but if he charges extra for something, they have no way of knowing how much he got, so give them twenty-five percent instead, because if you never give them anything extra, they’ll get suspicious. Don’t let anyone pay in check, which seems like the sort of obvious thing he’d fuck up his first time if he wasn’t thinking about it.

Buy a nicer fucking suit, Vic suggests, grey will go best with your eyes, lose the shitty tie and get something cuter.  Maybe spring for a vest.  There’s an awkward thirty seconds where he measures Yancy’s shoulder-waist ratio with his hands and concludes he would look great in a vest and that he should start doing squats if he ever wants any sort of ass.

It’s… informative.

Vic kisses his cheek when he leaves him at the doorstep.  “And don’t be a nervous wreck or we’ll fire you, Bambi.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence!” Yancy calls down the street after his retreating back.

But for all the advice, it turns out having sex with a man isn’t as complicated as spending a week thinking about the fact that he’s going to have sex with a man.

Yancy’s always thought of himself as exclusively straight, and he’s never had any evidence to the contrary, but he understands the laws of supply and demand, so he accepts he’s going to have to go gay for pay.  And even though, honestly, the thought doesn’t bother him that much, doesn’t strike him as the sort of instant turn-off that other straight guys’ knee-jerk no-homo responses would suggest.

Even if he’s not having second thoughts or a sexual identity crisis, though, it’s kind of a nerve-wracking idea.

Will he be able to get it up? Hell, will he even have to? Will that matter to whatever guy hired him?  Exactly how much will his inexperience show through?  It’s been nine years since the last time he was anything even approaching virginal, so this sort of sexual worry is sort of a new experience.

In the end, it mostly makes him wonder if his first girlfriend was as worried at sixteen as he is now that it’ll hurt.  For about fifteen seconds, he thinks about asking Raleigh, because he knows the little bastard has taken it from time to time, given that the walls aren’t that thick and never have been and Raleigh caterwauls like someone is stabbing him every time he gets laid.  But in the end, it just feels too suspicious to ask, and frankly, downright weird for him to get sex advice from his little brother instead of the other way around.

He does do a _lot_ of internet research, though.  If the NSA is watching him, they’re fucking laughing.

But after all the research, it actually ends up being pretty easy.  The guy is older—calls himself Ted, which Yancy sincerely doubts is his real name, given the hesitation before he says it, which makes him wish he’d given a fake name, too—and according to him, he usually asks for the new guy.

It is at this point that Yancy realizes he no longer has any right whatsoever to pass judgement on anyone who regularly pays for sex.

“I’m the softball question,” Ted says, like he thinks Yancy has had any time to give a good goddamn about politics.

It does hurt, a little, but not that much, and he does have a little trouble keeping it up, but all in all, it’s not a completely horrible experience, and he gets tipped in cash afterwards, which feels distinctly strange and weirdly normal all at once, after having worked as a waiter at least once or twice.

“Relax, Yancy,” Ted keeps saying, and he uses the opportunity to think of the name he’s going to give to the next guy who asks.

“Telling me to relax isn’t relaxing, for your future reference,” he says drily into the pillow when they’re done.

It gets a laugh, at least.

The oddest thing about it, other than the fact that he feels like his sphincter will never close properly again and he’s kind of horny, since he never got into it enough to really get off, he doesn’t feel any different.  Before he walks through the door of his and Raleigh’s apartment, he examines himself for sexual or moral crises or a bad case of semen on his suit pants and finds nothing.

“Passed my physics midterm,” Raleigh says when he comes in, going to hug him with the one arm he isn’t using to make macaroni and cheese at two in the morning. “And you need a shower, Yance.”

“Been a long day,” Yancy say, because he sincerely doubts gay sex is something his kid brother can smell on him, after how thorough he was with cleaning.  There wasn’t a shower in the public bathroom he ducked into, but he’s creative.  “Tell me about physics, kid.”

“Did you work out after work or something?”

“Raleigh—”

“ _Yancy_ ,” Raleigh mocks him, and pushes him down into one of the dining room chairs with just enough force to make him struggle not to wince.  “C’mon, start talking. Have you eaten?”

“Yeah,” Yancy says, and that’s about the last true word he says for the next half-hour.

 

Just before his birthday he has enough money to buy a grey suit that actually fits.

Yancy has gone suit shopping once in his entire life, and it was when he was eight and his mother’s mom had died and they’d had to go to her funeral.  He doesn’t remember much about it except that he and Raleigh had spent a good six hours on the day of the funeral pretending to be penguins and Jazmine had screamed for four of the six hours because she’d gotten nosebleeds on the plane to France and her three-year-old brain didn’t appreciate that. He doesn’t remember a damned thing about the actual shopping and he’d worn one of Richard’s old suits to Mom’s funeral.

All suits look the fucking same, is the thing.

The tags assure him he’s looking at five different shades of grey right now, but he’s pretty sure they tags are lying to him, because they’re identical, he swears. Despairing, he sends a picture to Jazmine and Raleigh with fifteen question marks under it.

Raleigh is at work, so Jazmine replies first:

_fourth one from the left is best for you pasty mcfreckles_

Yancy rolls his eyes at the phone.  He is not that pale, he’s just not Raleigh.  And that is not a crime.  They cannot all be golden boy.  Someone has to be the hot brother, he knows it’s not him, everyone can stop rubbing it in.

 _Im calling you that now_ , Raleigh writes.

 _I know where you both sleep_ , Yancy tells them.

 _yeah_ , Jazmine replies, _about that do you still kiss raleigh goodnight when you tuck him in or did that stop when baby went to college_

Raleigh says, _I think im going to let yancy handle that one_

Yancy chooses to just let Raleigh stew in that for a while and buys the fourth suit from the left, knowing it’s too cheap to be really _nice_ and also knowing it’s too expensive for comfort.  Groceries are going to be tight this month.  Jazmine isn’t getting a birthday dinner next year unless he figures out how to sell them on the idea of the extra money coming from somewhere that isn’t him selling his ass. Money is a problem, it’s always been a problem—or, well, it hasn’t, but he barely remembers when it wasn’t. There was a year of medical bills making things tough and then Richard vanishing and frankly, he has no idea how he managed to keep his siblings out of state homes without turning to anything more illegal than some white lies on tax forms before this.

The shittiest part is, they’d just been getting sort of comfortable, he thinks.  They weren’t rich, probably weren’t ever gonna be, but he wasn’t having to skip meals and make Jazmine wear too-small clothes anymore and they were almost at that place where he was pretty sure they were never going to have to go back to that level of “barely scraping by” again.

But here they are, only now Jazmine isn’t growing anymore, so she doesn’t have any clothes to remind her they’re struggling, and Raleigh is doing what he did then: keeping his head down and not complaining when there’s something they can’t afford and trusting Yancy to take care of him.

Yancy’s going to. Of course he’s going to. He’d take shittier jobs than this to take care of his brother and sister.  But sometimes, sometimes he wants to be angry about the fact that he’s had to be the responsible adult since he was thrown into the deep end of the pool at eighteen.

Fuck’s sake, he hasn’t gotten laid—he chooses, for reasons he doesn’t feel like working through, not to include lays where money changes hands—for two years.  He hasn’t had a drink outside the apartment in four. He hasn’t dated since he was _seventeen_.

And that all fucking sucks, and he hates wearing ties.

He tightens it around his neck until the knot presses into his Adam’s apple.

For his birthday, Raleigh gets him a hot pink tie to go with the suit, probably just to spite him.

Jazmine tells him she bought a bus ticket down for Thanksgiving, which he’s not ashamed to tell Raleigh beats out his present this year.  He misses his little sister like she was his kid.  She calls twice a week, but he thinks about her in between. He wonders about her GPA. Wonders whether she’s having fun. Staying safe.  Recently she’s started calling to comment on whatever election is going on—he’s not really sure, still isn’t paying attention—and how she’s volunteering for the Green Party in her area, which Raleigh tells her is nice even though Yancy knows he also doesn’t give a good goddamn about politics.

They don’t have the data in their phone plan to let her call them on video, so she sends him pictures of her doing college things.

She gets one in the middle of a test.

 _Put your cell phone away, you cheater_ , he texts her.

_because you definitely know about rate orders and mechanisms_

_PUT IT AWAY._

_yes dad_

 

It gets easier. Yancy’s always been charming, probably just through a chance of personality rather than any effort on his part, so it’s easy to relax into the routine of the “date” after a few minutes of feeling it out, if there is one.  Most of them cut straight to the sex, but some of them want him to go somewhere with them, take him out to dinner.  Like they were actually dating instead of just exchanging dick for three hundred an hour.

The other straight guys who work with the agency tell him it never really stops being hard to get it up for guys, but sometime around Christmas, he realizes he’s gotten used to it without even noticing.  Realizes he’s started thinking about whether or not a guy is attractive the same way he does about the women he “goes out” with.

It’s not the same, not at all, but he guesses he does find them attractive.  So he still doesn’t exactly feel any different, but he does feel a little less straight.

He briefly considers the idea that the nutjobs who say liking men is a lifestyle choice could be right, but in the end concludes it’s much more likely he’s always been bi and just assumed he was straight than that the homophobes are right about anything.

“Sex has never been fun,” says one girl, whose first words to him were, “No names,” over the dinner she’s paying for, with all the subtlety of a brick being dropped through a pane of glass.  “I don’t get what all the fuss is about; I can always do it better by myself than any of my boyfriends have.”

Yancy laughs, not because he finds it funny but because he thinks she’d like him to find it funny. “Maybe they weren’t very good at it.”

“That’s why I’m here,” she says.

He thinks about telling her that he didn’t get any more job training than the next hooker, but decides not to argue. “Consider all my practice up until now solely for your benefit.”

He’s pretty sure he doesn’t shatter her world, but he does at least manage to make her come twice.

“Thanks,” she says as he’s leaving.

“My pleasure,” he replies, and kisses her on the forehead before he goes.  Guys tend not to let him kiss them as much.

She smiles. “My name’s Katie.”

“It was nice to meet you, Katie,” he says before he closes the door behind him.

Most of them are friendly.

Some of them use the fact that he’s unlikely to say no to be mean.  Mostly guys.  The first week of Raleigh’s first summer break he comes home hobbling, because most days he can make himself walk normally, even if he feels like somebody’s shoved a poker up his ass, but today he literally can’t bring himself to.  “Fell down the stairs.  I think I cracked at least fifty vertebrae,” he tells Raleigh when he asks. Jazmine is coming down for the summer in two days, though, so he’s got to get things figured out pretty fast on the what to tell them front.

This year he’s earned, with subtracted living expenses, about $20,000, which is not a lot, considering how much college he’s paying for, but it’s enough for… well. Half of one year of Raleigh’s school and nothing else.  They’re still about $22,000 in the hole for this year, but that’s only if he manages to figure out how to put the 30k towards the debt without ringing any alarm bells.

Jazmine comes back sunburned and with cheap purple streaks in her dark brown hair, looking happier about her year than he’s ever seen her look since Dominique had died. Raleigh drags her out to meet Mako one night while he’s “working late,” and from all accounts it goes swimmingly, but it’s a little hard to listen to the story of how drunk whoever they’d had with them had gotten when he’s trying to get the residual taste of latex out of his mouth and balance the budget.  It’s a surprisingly resilient flavour, which he’s learned to his absolute displeasure over the last seven months.

Instead of saying anything about the money, he just pays it in.

Neither of them even ask.

In a way, it’s a relief, but part of him is annoyed that he’s been worrying about something they don’t even think to pay attention to.


End file.
